A quantum operation/quantum channel is called a noisy operation [Horodecki, Horodecki & Oppenheim 2003] or a unistochastic channel [Życzkowski & Bengtsson 2004] if it has an environmental representationhannel#QuantumChannelsAndDecoherence) where the environment/bath system is in its maximally mixed state:
The theorem (herechannel#QuantumChannelsAsPartialTracesOfUnitariesOnTensors)) that every endo-quantum channel has an environmental representation is often advertized with the addendum that “… and such the environment may be chose to be in a pure state”, but in fact this is assumption is what the existing proofs rely on. For environments in non-pure states it is not clear that they can environmentally represent all quantum channels, and for noisy/unistochastic channels it is not to be expected that they exhaust all quantum channels.
But Müller-Hermes & Perry 2019 show that all unital quantum channels on qbits can be realized as noisy/unistochastic channels (with a bath of size at least 4).
Precursor discussion of the concept is due to:
Michal Horodecki, Pawel Horodecki, Jonathan Oppenheim, Reversible transformations from pure to mixed states, and the unique measure of information, Phys. Rev. A 67 062104 (2003) [doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.67.062104, arXiv;quant-ph/0212019]
(who speak of “noisy operations”)
David Poulin, Robin Blume-Kohout, Raymond Laflamme, Harold Ollivier, around (2) of: Exponential speed-up with a single bit of quantum information: Testing the quantum butterfly effect, Phys. Rev. Lett. 92 177906 (2004) [arXiv:quant-ph/0310038, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.92.177906]
The terminology “unistochastic channels” was introduced in:
Karol Życzkowski, Ingemar Bengtsson, p. 13 of: On Duality between Quantum Maps and Quantum States, Open Systems & Information Dynamics 11 01 (2004) 3-42 [doi:10.1023/B:OPSY.0000024753.05661.c2]
Ingemar Bengtsson, Karol Życzkowski, p. 259 of: Geometry of Quantum States — An Introduction to Quantum Entanglement, Cambridge University Press (2006) [doi:10.1017/CBO9780511535048, ResearchGate]
Marcin Musz, Marek Kuś, Karol Życzkowski, Unitary quantum gates, perfect entanglers, and unistochastic maps, Phys. Rev. A 87 022111 [doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.87.022111]
Proof that all unital quantum channels on qubits are unistochastic (noisy operations) for a bath of size at least 4:
In one direction, assume that
is a completely positive map. Then by operator-sum decomposition there exists a set (finite, under our assumptions) inhabited by at least one element
and an -indexed set of linear operators
such that
Now take
with its canonical Hermitian inner product-structure with orthonormal linear basis and consider the linear map
Observe that this is a linear isometry
This implies that is injective so that we have a direct sum-decomposition of its codomain into its image and its cokernel orthogonal complement, which is unitarily isomorphic to summands of that we may identify as follows:
In total this yields a unitary operator
and we claim that this has the desired action if we couple the system to the pure bath state: :
A linear isometry is a linear map
between vector spaces equipped with (Hermitian) inner products (often: Hilbert spaces) which preserves these inner products, in that
or equivalently in terms of adjoint operators:
If also the reverse condition holds, then is called a unitary operator, which is the case iff is surjective map.
By the general theorem about environmental representations of quantum channels, every quantum measurement channel on a quantum system may be decomposed as
coupling of to an environment/bath system ,
unitary evolution of the composite system ,
averaging the result over the environment states.
The way this works specifically for quantum measurement channels has precursor discussion von Neumann 1932 §VI.3 and received much attention in discussion of quantum decoherence following Zurek 1981 and Joos & Zeh 1985.
(independently and apparently unkowingly of the general discussion of environmental representations in Lindblad 1975)
Concretely,
(we shall restrict attention to finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces not to get distracted by technicalities that are irrelevant to the point we are after)
if denotes the initial state of a “device” quantum system then any notion of this device measuring the given quantum system (in its measurement basis , ) under their joint unitary quantum evolution should be reflected in a unitary operator under which [Zurek 1981 (1.1), Joos & Zeh 1985 (1.1.), following von Neumann 1932 §VI.3, review includes Schlosshauer 2007 (2.51)]:
the system remains invariant if it is purely in any eigenstate of the measurement basis,
while in this case the measuring system evolves to a corresponding “pointer state” :
for and distinct elements of an (in practice: approximately-)orthonormal basis for . (There is always a unitary operator with this mapping property (1), for instance the one which moreover maps and is the identity on all remaining basis elements.)
But then the composition of the corresponding unitary quantum channel with the averaging channel over is indeed equal to the -measurement quantum channel on (cf. eg. Schlosshauer 2007 (2.117), going back to Zeh 1970 (7)), as follows:
Last revised on September 28, 2023 at 06:54:18. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.